Author: Sean Ongley

  • How to Maintain Your Held Belt

    Offering some tips about maintaining your “classic” Held belt.

    This is by far the best selling design in the catalogue and these steps apply broadly across other models. The “classic” has the attractive appearance of a standard black leather belt, but it is actually waterproof vulcanized rubber, making it the perfect belt for workers.

    The belt in this video has been exposed to all kinds of labor, from dish rooms to construction sites, for four years. It has taken on paint, oils, extra weight as a tool belt, and it has years to go before coming out of service.

    Proper cleaning, oiling, and clipping extends the life and appearance of the belt against all of the abuse it goes through.

    Removing Paint and Cleaning

    The rubber strap accepts paint but it is removable. Using standard mineral spirit paint thinner and a microfiber cloth, it can be rubbed out by hand.

    If your belt does not have paint stains, any oil and grease that the strap is exposed to can be removed with dish soap and water.

    Although it can take water, make sure to quickly dry the belt and wipe off all remaining dust and debris.

    Oiling the Strap

    Rubber is not unlike leather, its microscopic fibers will dry out and lose integrity. It turns out that non-silicone based leather oil is beneficial, although silicone and rubber go hand in hand, it is not ideal for a wearable product.

    Huberd’s brand shoe leather oil is a natural legacy product from a small company based in Colorado. The product was created in nineteenth century Oregon, and was a solution for timber manufacturing waste at the time and remains so today.

    Common olive oil is a known classic moisturizer for wearable rubbers like rain boots. It is an option that most people have on hand.

    Clipping Frayed Edges

    This step applies to almost every Held strap.

    They are super strong, but nothing is impervious to wear. Depending on how hard you work your belt, it wears gradually at the edges.

    The edges can be clipped routinely. For best results, obtain 5.5 inch angled scissors. These are good to keep with your sewing kit anyway.

    By bending the backside of the belt toward you, it makes targeting the frayed sections much easier, while the angled scissor gives you a more ergonomic experience.

    Reinforcing the Notches

    We offer reinforcement grommets. A good tool belt will include these type of brass grommets, as belt notches always expand faster under extra weight.

    The belt in this video had grommets added after more than three years of use, when the used notches began to lose their integrity.

    Grommets are very difficult to press into Held’s dense straps without a 2-ton press like the kind used in the shop. That is why we offer mail-order service. Refer to the repair and customize section of this website.

  • How To Distinguish Leather Straps

    A fun 1980’s themed how-to guide video series for HELDgear.com.

    This video goes into inferior leather products, including fake leather that is designed to trick the customer who is enticed by an impossibly low price tag, or the vegan who doesn’t account for labor conditions.

    HELD straps are a repurposed industrial material sourced from domestic factories. They are built to work, whereas most leather and vegan belts such as “PU Leather” are built to look good but rapidly decay, buckles break, contributing to waste, pollution, and exploitive labor, as they are rarely sourced from American manufacturers.

    The leather industry has papered over the inferiority of their product with jargon. For example “top grain” leather is actually below the top surface, under the most durable layer of cow hide.

    What is called “genuine” is not what most people believe it is. At best, there is a cosmetic layer of pure leather glued on top of particulate matter. At worst, it is ground up leather mixed with filler, bonded with toxic glues.

    In some cases, a genuine leather product is recycled, derived from used or scrap waste, but any business claiming this should always be vetted for their sourcing and labor practices.

    HELD straps are vulcanized sheets of fabric: cotton, polyester, nylon, or a blend. This involves tree-derived rubbers heated and cooled to fully embed the fabric sheets. The result is one fully formed material built for high stress conditions.

    Industrial strength fabric is embedded within the rubber, similar to bicycle tires, and the composite product is immensely stronger than one or the other alone. It is excellent for hanging tools, rock climbing gear, and other auxiliaries.

    One reason for the lack of raw hide leather in department stores is that many cows sustain all kinds of skin infections, from insect bites to disease. This leaves porous, unattractive mars on the surface of the leather. Raw hide leather is extremely durable, but if it comes from an abused cow, the actual surface of the hide is discarded and likely ground up for genuine leather products. This denotes a problem with animal exploitation in agriculture.

    Pure raw hide leather straps from free range cows are difficult to find and very expensive. Top grain is the solution for leather fabricators who need a product they can sell that will last a few solid years. No good for vegans, however, and HELD is here to offer products for everyone.

    The manufacturers we buy from pay living wages to workers. The HELD belt is a fractional runoff from a massive industry in which thousands of feet of conveyor belting is produced every day.

    That we source a portion of our straps from unused production ends helps with industrial waste solutions. Weighed against manufacturing processes in the textile industry, and short life of inferior products, every Held belt around someone’s waist reduces at least two more units in the landfill from an inferior product.

    When a Held belt becomes undesirable cosmetically, the strap can be repurposed in whole, as in belting a bed roll or something like that, or in parts, like hinges on a trunk or to hang a sign.

    We hope this video helps you understand what you’re buying before you buy it, whether or not you choose HELD.

    Photo of discarded leather by Mark Ahsmann.

  • Bitcoin and Crypto Payments Now Available

    Durability is one of the pillars of the Held brand. Cryptocurrencies are a new frontier that people can use toward a more durable future. Coinbase is an American publicly traded company that provides the most trustworthy solution for a range of crypto payments.

    As of now, none of the online retailers that we have stores with offer a cryptocurrency payment solution.

    Held Gear dot com is hosted by a small Oregon-based company with longstanding values in security and privacy. This website is powered by open source and free software including WooCommerce and Coinbase Commerce. These systems provide all the solutions Held needs for the scaled growth of the brand, without compromising the privacy and security of its customers.

    Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, Shiba Inu, and many more units are accepted at checkout. Just shop and before using fiat, select the crypto payment box and use your CoinBase account to complete the order. Please contact if you have any questions.

  • Fashion Show Friday!

    Fashion Show Friday!

    For the first time in many years, Held Gear is participating in a fashion show. This August 12, we will be combining forces with two artists to show the range of styles that these products coordinate with.

    Leaning toward the hip hop and street clothes fashion, we’re working with Bullshitforsale. The brand is humorous, the name is tongue and cheek. He cuts up thrift shop scores into complete one-of-a-kind pieces, and our Mammoth and Snow Ermine straps will cut through the mosaic styles he crafts.

    Swinging toward goth and punk with a twist of dark magic, Cult Ties will be presenting one ensemble and is modeling the black strap known as “classic.” She produces hand knit apparel and more crafts.

    To be determined at rehearsal, other models will sport the Auroch and Summer Sky sets.

    Standardizing a belt, cuff, and collar set for every primary Held strap, while showing them in a runway setting is a milestone for this brand. The sets have always been there, but presented like an ensemble, it hasn’t been done yet.

    Micah and I were there in Portland, Oregon when it was young, gritty limitlessly creative, and I haven’t felt that energy for over a decade, until now in Philadelphia. Held Gear is lucky to be here.

    The show is produced by Bigbootybotanist, a Temple University student making the most of her summer. It is her first fashion show but she is determined to keep on with event production.

    -Sean